


Some Secret You Wouldn’t Tell but Let it Choke Your Neck

by loonyBibliophile



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jemma POV, weird backstory meta fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:13:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2267607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loonyBibliophile/pseuds/loonyBibliophile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons tries not to think too hard about how Leopold Fitz could destroy her if he wanted to. She chastised herself for it at least once a day, berating herself for letting another person become so close to her, so very ingrained in her every day life so as to feel like a permanent fixture. But nothing is permanent. Believing in permanence is impractical. But the problem is that no one has ever liked Simmons as much as Leopold Fitz does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Secret You Wouldn’t Tell but Let it Choke Your Neck

> _**"Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. This is what love is" -WTNV** _

Jemma Simmons tries not to think too hard about how Leopold Fitz could destroy her if he wanted to. She chastised herself for it at least once a day, berating herself for letting another person become so close to her, so very ingrained in her every day life so as to feel like a permanent fixture. But nothing is permanent. Believing in permanence is impractical. But the problem is that no one has ever  _liked_  Simmons as much as Leopold Fitz does. 

Simmons has been loved, she knows that. Her parents love her. The team loves her, in their own way. But her parents, for all their best efforts, had never understood her and they’d always fought. She loved them, and they loved her, but most days they didn’t like each other much. She loved the team and they loved her, much like a family does, but they were co-workers. Nobody liked their coworkers all the time. Even if they love them. 

And she’d been lusted after and admired, at the academy. She was young and pretty and well dressed and brilliant, so of course she was wanted and admired. But the few boys she took out or took home, that’s all it was. A passing fancy, a moment of infatuation. At the end of the day they valued her for things she did, and for things she had no control over. They didn’t know anything about her, or she about them. 

But Leopold Fitz liked her. At the end of the day, underneath everything else, he liked her. Even when they were bickering, or even if they were full on fighting, screaming at each other across the lab table or across the room. He admired her, thought she was brilliant. She was relatively sure he found her attractive. And he loved her, they were best friends, of course he loved her, that’s how best friends worked. 

But at the base of all that, underneath the love and trust and admiration, he just thought she was good company. A good and valuable person beyond her skills and abilities and looks. And that’s what made him dangerous. Because she knew she could depend on him, when everything else fell away, he would be there anyway, because he  _liked_ her. So, somewhere down the line, she’d let herself forget that people are not permanent. 

Her mother had always told her to never put all her eggs in one basket. So of course, however accidentally, that’s what she’d done. She’d put everything on the Academy, then on SHIELD, on this team, and most of all on Fitz. And now all of those things had fallen away. SHIELD was dead in the water, stuttering a long with a handful of agents. And Fitz. Fitz who had hated her and then liked her and then loved her but still liked her even more than he loved her. Sure, he’d awoken. But he was tired and bitter and hurt and it scared her. It scared her more than she’d ever admit, maybe even to Fitz. 

So she did what she always did, and overcompensated for her perceived failings. She threw herself into caring for Fitz, as much as he’d let her, and into training with May, and with helping Coulson in his new role as director of SHIELD, and into helping Skye and Trip deal with what happened with Ward and Garret. 

Fitz noticed. She knew he did. He’d always been good at then, once they got close. He could pick out the minute motions of her fingers twitching impatiently, or the pinch of her shoulders when she panicked, all the little things she never even knew she was doing. it was unnerving and comforting at the same time. But he didn’t say anything. She couldn’t decide if she wanted him to. Like most things, it came to a head eventually. 

Simmons is sitting outside when he approaches her, finally, hands in his pockets half out of habit and half because his arms are still so tired and sore all the time. 

"I reckon we’ve got some things ta talk about." he says simply, sitting down on the chair opposite hers. He doesn’t scoot it over to her side of the table like he might have six months ago. She’s not sure how to tell about that either. She thinks he means the ocean, the things they said underwater when she thought they were both about to die, when he thought he was about to die, when their co-existence seemed inevitably cut short. Neither of them had mentioned anything since he woke up. Instead she asks him a question. 

"Why did you stop hating me?" 

"Wait, what?" he frowns, eyebrows furrowing and lips pursing, like she’s just said something criminally insane

"At the Academy. You ignored and avoided and tried to one up me for months. It wasn’t until I convinced that teacher to make us lab partners you stopped. Why?" 

"Hated you? Simmons what in the hell are you talking about? I didn’t hate you, I was afraid of you. I ignored you because I had no bloody idea how to speak to you, because I’d never had to deal with someone smarter than me before. Wait, you’ve gone these… ten years thinking for the first six months we knew each other I hated you? I was just trying to think of something to say." _  
_

"So the entire time I have existed in your life. You’ve liked me as a person. You were never jealous or hated me or strove to be better than me?"

"God no. I always thought we’d get on and wanted to impress you, that’s all."

"Unbelievable." she muttered, shaking her head. Fitz frowned, cocking his head. 

"Are you… mad?" 

"No, no I’m just. reevaluating my life, I suppose." 

"Are you alright, Jemma?" his voice goes soft and he frowns again, and Simmons hangs her head in her hands. 

"No. I’m furious with myself." she laughed slightly, running her hands through her hair. 

"Oi, if you hated me, don’t feel too badly." he chuckled "You certainly wouldn’t be the first." 

"No, no, I never hated you either. I’m furious with myself because you  _like_  me so bloody much. You’re the only person who’s ever just liked me, for no real reason, without expecting anything from me. You just  _like_ me and it’s awful because it’s made me forget how to be a practical and sane human being.” 

"I’m really confused right now." 

"My mother always told me people are the most dangerous thing in the world because we’re fickle and impermanent and built to hurt each other even if it’s not on purpose. But then, Leopold Fitz, come stumbling into my life with your ridiculous accent and soft hair and you  _liked_ me and suddenly it was like I’d forgotten all that. At some point I just accepted you as a solid and permanent fixture of my life and it makes me feel stupid because I could lose you and it would destroy me and it would be my own fault for letting myself believe you’d always be here.” 

"Jemma." his voice sounds sad, maybe a little scared. "It’s normal to like people you know. It’s normal to be afraid of something happening to them." 

"But I’m not normal! I’m exceptional!" 

"That doesn’t mean you feel things less, Jem. People have feelings. Exceptional people feel exceptionally." it’s half a joke but not really. 

"You know everything about me, Leo." she hasn’t said his name in months, years maybe. Maybe not since the academy and late nights in quiet dorms, huddled under blankets whispering secrets about all the things they’d ever done or wanted to do. When she’d held the sound of his voice around her nickname in the back of her head every moment of every day. Jem, like even just her name was something precious and important to him, purely for happening to belong to her. But his name still rolls easy from her lips, because familiarity is impossible to unlearn. "You could destroy me. If you wanted to." 

"Why would I ever do that?" he looks genuinely worried, hands twitching in the way they do when he wants to touch her and isn’t sure he should.

"Because you could? Why does anyone do anything awful?" her fingers grip tight at the edges of her chair and she knows he can tell from the way her chest slumps forward that she’s gotten to the root of the problem. 

"This is about Ward, isn’t it?" he knows she’s strong but he asks carefully anyway, because god forbid he ever hurt her, even on accident. Simmons nods. 

"I’ve been spending so much time helping Skye, trying to talk her through it, and all I can think is ‘What would I have done if it was Fitz? What would I have done if Fitz turned on us, on me?’. And I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m supposed to know  _everything_  Fitz.” she sounds desperate, and she wonders if he remembers the night she fell asleep crying in his bed the night she’d failed her first exam at the academy. 

"Nobody knows everything. Even you. And it doesn’t matter what you’d do if I was evil. D’you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because it didn’t happen and it’s not going to. What ifs never helped anyone, Jemma."

"I know." her voice isn’t much above a whisper, and her fingers are clutching her sweater instead of her chair. 

"We’re best friends, better than most. And I suppose I screwed up a little, making you have no choice in who lived and who died. So I’m sorry about tha’. And I’m sorry about Ward and I’m sorry you’re scared, and I’m sorry if I… if I mucked us up. By saying what I said. but you’re right, I like you more than I’ll ever love you in… that way. You’re my best friend first, always, that’s what matters. You’re what matters." 

"Well.. we’re both here at least. That’s what’s important. We are both alive and here in the same place. And you didn’t muck anything up, Fitz. I-" 

"We don’t have to, you know." 

"What?"

"Talk about.. What I said. We don’t have to." 

"Let me finish, will you?" there’s a note of play in her voice for the first time in weeks, and Fitz breathes a sigh of relief. 

"Sorry, sorry." he smiles, just barely, and waves his hands in surrender. 

"I just wanted to say that I would have done the same." 

"The… same?"

"Am I going to have to be blunt?"

"Maybe I want you to be blunt." the teasing makes her smile. 

"Well, thankfully for you, I have guts even when I’m not dying." It’s the first time either of them has made a joke about. In a weird way, it feels good. Normal. Simmons stands and walks over to Fitz, settling comfortably in his lap. He startles for a moment, but settles in seconds later. 

"Jemma…" he says, his voice quiet and hesitant. 

"I’ve always liked the way you say my name. Like it’s a secret. Something special and important. Just because it’s mine." 

He doesn’t say anything in response because she’s tracing the path she seared into his face on the ocean floor, kissing from one side to the other, but this time there are no tears, and the sun is bright over head, and instead of pulling away she leans in and slots her lips onto his. Simmons has kissed before, a handful of boys in dark corners of the boiler room, boys who probably had more practice than Fitz does. But even though he’s smaller than they were, less muscular, none of them ever held her quite the same way. But Fitz’s hands on her hips, holding tight like he might never be able to again, are warm and solid. She pulls away from kissing him and buries her face in his neck. 

Fitz has always been warm and she’s never understood. His neck is hot against the cool of her cheeks, and he smells like woodsmoke and heated metal. She thinks for a moment about how, if he wanted to, he could quite literally stab her in the back, let her bleed out on his lap. but he would never do that, because he loves her, and he likes her, and most of all because he’s Fitz. 

"I love you." she says, suddenly. She didn’t set out to tell him, and the beginning of this conversation. But it was true, and she’d given him so much of her to keep safe already, one last piece couldn’t hurt. 

"I love you too." he whispers in return, his voice warm and smiling. 

After all, she has all his pieces too. She’d never let anything happen to him, so she knows if there’s anything in this world her secrets are safe with, it’s Fitz. 


End file.
